Back in 1995 I ran Session8, Cubase and SampleCell II on a 486 PC. This system wokred incredibly well as hardly anything was done ITB. The SampleCell card had it’s on board RAM and the audio drive was attached directly to the Session8 card. Of course I had an analog mixer. 1998 I made the jump to ProTools Mix2, but I still ran Cubase in parallel for the midi stuff. Although PT4 was able to record and playback midi you could only edit regions of it Around 2002 during PT6 i felt the midi functionality of PT begun to deliver my basic needs. A third party USB-midi interface sometimes bothered me with poor latency during recording though. I got HD late 2004 and since early 2009 I’m on PT8. The Midi I/O has never disappointed me.